Gertrude Bell 's Persian Pictures : A Study Of The Landscape

Moreover, this construction as the foreign eastern country as feminine is the typical western view of the orient. This view of the Orient is connected to Edward Said's concept of

Although Said didn’t directly look into gender orientalism he had made a great point in his article when discussing how the West view woman in an Oriental society. “[…] she never spoke of herself, and she never represented her emotions, presence or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male […]” (Said, Page 6). In this part Said is discussing how Western men would

“In all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas... The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,-- that oliver-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.” 94 Both women describe the land of desert with such vividness that one is not left with the idea of a barren, sandy soil but an environment that is rich with history as well as life. This life and history of the land are a part of the culture.

They tell a kind of Indian folklore which is not of India, but constructed by Kipling himself. This is not to suggest that what The Jungle Book depicts is a work of complete imagination; ‘essentially an idea’ with no corresponding reality, but rather that there are ‘regular constellations of ideas which become the pre-eminent thing about the Orient’. The Orient is conceptualised by strict and rigid lines of thinking which can never do justice to the ‘lives, histories and customs’ of the ‘cultures and nations whose location is in the East’. It is the pre-supposed authority of what ‘is said about them (the Orient) in the West’ which establishes the relationship between the Occident and the Orient as one of ‘power, of domination, of varying degrees of cultural hegemony.’5

The reader gets a rare and exotic understanding of a totally foreign and ancient culture experiencing the growing pains of colonial expansion during the British domination

This examination of intercultural relations is best begun with the interactions between the European explorers and colonists and the native inhabitants of the New World. From the first footfalls of Columbus in 1492 to the present day, the native inhabitants have been “…a familiar but little known—and, indeed, often an unreal-person to the non-Indian.”(Josephy, Jr., 1973) In fact the term Indian stems from Columbus’ own error in believing that he had reached the Indies off the coast of Asia. He termed the inhabitants he found “los Indios”, and subsequent explorers and chroniclers continued the misuse of the term. In and of itself this mistake in not monumental, however the resulting patterns of interactions and lack of viewing the native inhabitants as unique and socially diverse groups defined the reference set for European based culture for the next 400 plus years.

Similarly, Said’s description of Orientalism is also an example of modernity, in that he describes it as an “imaginative examination [based] exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness […] governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projects”. Thus, in Tracey Deer’s Mohawk Girls technologies of modernity can be seen through the creation and subsequent isolation of many First Nations to reserves, and the classification and declaration of “Indian-ness” or “Mohawk purity”.

The well-protected Domains ‘’Ideology and the Legitimating of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909’’ (I.B.Tauris, and pg.:5, 169). He was drawing upon Orientalism and it’s techniques of showing, he conjured upon in his paintings a domesticated vision of the Orient; an Eastern fantasy space they appealed to the exoticism sensibility of European audiences, and was also heavily informed by late Ottoman agenda son self-identification and projection. The Eastern-world is a real place in Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings. He painted the topics elaborately, after detailed observations and using the documents.

The old saying “The sun never sets on the British empire” is a phrase usually associated to reference the vast swaths of land the English nation acquired through colonial expansion during the 19th and early 20th centuries. With this in mind, writers during the Late Victorian Gothic period use English imperial control in places such as India to project perceived English racial superiority, dominance, and prestige. For instance, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 work “The Mark of the Beast”, the primitive nature of Indian culture is used to make a broader commentary on the advancement of western society. In order to understand why British authors continually conquer their imperial counterparts through their writings, sir Henry Frere’s 1882 Anthropology

The proprietor of Yoshiwara used to earn money in a variety of ways. One of them, and quite positively the most harmless, was to make bets that no man, be he ever so widely travelled, was capable of guessing to what weird mixture of races he owed his face. So far, he had won all such bets, and would sweep in the money with hands of such cruel beauty they would not have shamed an ancestor of the Spanish Borgias, the nails of which showed an inobliterable shimmer of blue. On the other hand, the politeness of his smile on such profitable occasions originated unmistakably in that graceful insular world, which, from the eastern border of Asia, smiles gently and watchfully across the sea at mighty America.

“...Orientalism is not so innocent a form of knowledge as this. Instead, he redefines Orientalism as the ubiquity of a sense of the division of the world into two spheres in aesthetic production, popular culture, and scholarly, sociological, and historical texts. In other words, he is suggesting that the concept of difference between east and west is a geopolitical difference which is written up throughout the texts of western culture whether through travel writing, political texts, paintings, or in academic discussions” (Sharp 2009, 31).

Postcolonialism deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. As originally used by historians after the Second World War in terms such as the post-colonial state, ‘post-colonial’ had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by literary critics to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization. The term has been widely used to signfy the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies that were former European colonies. In the present age we can say without any shadow of doubt that post colonialism has been primarily concerned to examine the processes and effects

In his Introduction to Orientalism, Edward Said asserts that the “Orient has helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” (71). Therefore, in Season of Migration to the

In comparing Zora Neale Hurston’s “Of Mules and Men” and Clifford Geertz’s “Balinese Cockfight” a direct difference between insider verses outsider is portrayed. Hurston’s approach of going back and immersing herself into the culture she grew up in and Geertz’s approach of immersing himself into a foreign culture results in a clear distinction in their ethnographic approach, focus of observation and consequently their findings.

In her work, she joins her disapproval of the abuse against women, non-Europeans, and the poor by the wealthy west. Spivak faces in her essay “epistemic violence” done by sermons of knowledge that shape the whole world. This epistemic violence is like a curse over subjects of discourses. It is similar to Edward Said idea (1935-2003; public intellectual and founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies). His idea of otherness in “Orientalism” display the bigotry of western scholars who write in a biased way about the East in order to create “ otherness”.